Baseball may be the dream in the Dominican Republic, but ProPublica finds the money around it can look more like a trap. Its investigation outlines a system in which thousands of teenage prospects are funneled through independent trainers, or buscones, who house and coach their young charges in exchange for as much as half of their eventual signing bonuses. Major League Baseball clubs, barred from officially signing players under 16, routinely skirt that rule with informal “preacuerdo” deals for kids as young as 11, spawning a parallel market of lenders who cash in on those future payouts by offering high-interest loans to families years before the actual bonuses come in.
The story zeroes in on one lender, Santo Caraballo, whose business grew after he arranged payments in a fatal car-crash case involving Pittsburgh Pirates player Oneil Cruz, then expanded through investments from Red Sox icon David Ortiz. Ortiz later helped rally opposition to an international draft that MLB argues would curtail under-the-table deals — without disclosing his financial ties to Caraballo, per ProPublica. The outlet also details MLB’s limited response. “Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” says a former Dominican commissioner of baseball. “But it’s not doing anything to stop it.” For the full investigation and more takeaways from the piece, more here.